Theme of American Dream in Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller - Research Paper Example

?The Theme of American Dream in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” And Its Reflection in His Life Introduction Literature is reflection of life and it evidently evolves out of time and society in which it is created. Likewise the importance of the concept of American Dream plays very crucial role in literature of America. The concept of American Dream is seated in the “United States Declaration of Independence” which proclaims that “all men are equal”. It also believes that every human being irrespective of their social class or circumstances pertaining to their birth are “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights” which includes “Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness” (Kamp, “Rethinking the American Dream”). The play “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller encapsulates within its tight-lipped plot, fall of a myth pertaining to American Dream and its vision that “success is obtained by being well-liked”. The essay intends to perceive and examine the theme of American Dream and its failure closely woven within the plot of the play that sets challenges to the capitalistic concepts and desires of new America. Arthur Miller was born on October 17th in the year of 1915 and expired on 10th February 2005. He was an eminent playwright and essayist from America. He was a very poignant figure in the American theatre and composed many important socio-political plays like “All My Sons (1947)”, “Death of a Salesman (1949)”, “The Crucible (1953)”, “A View from the Bridge (1955)” among others. Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is acclaimed as the first great American tragedy and while projecting it, Miller gained name for the American to understand the true essence of the nation and its tragedy. As a university graduate, he witnessed the hollow pursuit of the good life entwined with the American Dream in the society of America. The disillusioned socio-economic perspective and dystopia led Miller to compose the play, “Death of a Salesman” which was only possible for a person like Miller who came up from the mundane and meagre streets of Harlem in New York and was able to witness the unveiled mask of American Dream. The concept of American Dream operates at the national level in United States which includes a promise of freedom, possibility of prosperity and freedom and success. The definition of American Dream contended by James Torso Adams in the year 1931 was envisaged as “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” irrespective of social class or background. With this glittering vision in life, people of America started reconstructing their nation and society in the post-war period with immense faith on their destiny more than their hard-work or potentials. American Dream got concentrated on being rich overnight and the parameter for the pursuit of happiness got captivated to the scale of owing big house, glamorous cars and all the comfort which consumerism and materialism can bring to their citizens. This led to the death of spirituality and made every citizen hollow where the potentials of every American were being judged with their skilled salesmanship and not with their courage or hard-work. Soon, it became the society of the salesman whose only goal became selling commodities to earn profit and ceasing to be a man; every American is soon seen putting a mask of fraud and the ability to sell the commodities regardless of its intrinsic uselessness. “Death of a Salesman”: American Dream Realized or Shattered During the fall of the values associated with the American Dreams, many writers in their work captivated the concept with its shattering image. Arthur Miller is not an exception in this regard. He envisioned the dark side of the American Dream and in the year 1949, Miller yielded one of his finest plays which captivate the shattering of the American Dream in the post-war period. The tragedy is presented as the democratization of classical form of tragedy where the protagonist himself is obsessed by the greatness, embraces his own downfall manufactured by his unmovable conviction that has directly culminated out of his thought of personal charisma and popularity. A very close introspection to the play would launch its audience to a paradigm where the justification of the American Dream can be attempted and the interplay of the realization and shattering of the dream throughout the play can be intricately felt. At the outset of the play, we are introduced to an old salesman, the protagonist of the play, Willy Lowman. At the same time, the audiences are no where introduced to any product those he sales. This is a deliberate attempt by Miller as he wanted to depict Lowman as a common American struggling hard and trying to survive the frustration and unhealthy race for the pursuit of hollow happiness which the dream has brought along with it. He believes that only charisma and personality can bring successes and riches overnight. Space of innovation and hard work are very limited in pursuit of American Dream in Willy’s life. For this reason, we see that Willy tries to project his son’s time and again and make sure that they are always well-liked and popular. Arthur Miller made it quite pertinent through his play, “Death of a Salesman” that the entire society of America is subjugated to the hollow pursuit of happiness imbibed in the concept of the American Dream. To make his point more obvious, the audiences can find all the characters of the play are influenced by a chase that will make them rich and powerful overnight. This is the reason for which we find Charley commenting, “Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” ((Miller, “Death of a Salesman”, Pg - 120). Willy Loman’s family consisted of his wife Linda Loman and his two sons Biff Loman and Happy Loman. A microcosm of American nuclear family and contemporary society enabled its audiences to perceive the way each member belonging to different generation and age-group feel about the making of a nation with its dream. But at the centre of the play the motif of Willy, his objective gets merged with the modern man and his values which are very hollow. Miller himself could not understand and stated, “Willy gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it.....” (Sterling, “Arthur Miller's Death of a salesman”, Pg - 83). Apart from the protagonist of the play, Willy, there are other characters like Biff , Charley and Ben who have different set of ideals pertaining to the concept of American Dream and this launches the theme of the American Dream and its treatment to a greater cosmos in the play. Willy’s older brother Ben views American Dream as an ability to initiate with nothing and by some or the other means, makes out fortune of it. For Biff, the pursuit of happiness associated with the American Dream appears a bit confused and torn by the inner conflict where he is not sure of the “right” dream for himself. At one plane, he is resolved to opt for the world of his father which has business, capitalism and salesmanship and at the other plane, he is seen attracted by the dream that captivates and involves nature, outdoor jobs and working manually. Biff is pulled off with the two set of dreams but at the end of the play, audiences find that Biff believes that his father must have been a carpenter, or should have spend a more rustic life. At the end, the audience observes Biff to be disdained from his father’s dream at his funeral as moves out to the countryside to live a more rustic life where he would be able to do more manual jobs. Whereas through Ben, Miller tries to show the “rags to richer” perspective of American Dream and at the same time suggests one must be ruthless by instinct and nature to make the dream achievable. Charley, on the other hand like Ben, believes in the easy money making chase and tries to follow the footsteps of his father. Willy Loman is shown jealous of his brother Ben because he has that machoism, the capability to turn the wheel of fortune and through the tremendous charm, Ben is able to make everyone like him, which according to Willy is the only parameter of being successful in this world of salesmanship, capitalism and business. Willy is jealous of his brother because he aspires to achieve what Ben has already gained but he is well aware of his limitations and failures which he is not able to accept. The realization or shattering of the American Dream therefore is perceived through the failure and success of Willy Loman. His repeated failure from his business trips and propositions suggest that the crest and fall of Willy Loman’s life is actually symbol of crest and fall of American Dream and society. The only goal of Willy Loman is material success which he tries to achieve through constant masking for the purpose of hiding his deceptive faults. Willy believes that all the problems of his life can be solved by looking “well-liked” and for him all the relations are useless when it falls before the omnipotent power of dollar. Therefore, the failure of Willy as a Salesman is definitely the failure of American spirit of salesmanship and material pursuit. His subjection to suicide acts almost as a red-alert to the American society. The death of Willy Loman is actually manifested as a failure of millions of American Dream and pursuit for happiness. It shows that every American wants to be a rich and prosperous man and when they fail to achieve it, they are subjected to the dark abbey of frustration and depression and are compelled to embrace death. Death of Willy and death of the American Dream can be projected on the same platform as frustration and failure of Willy led him to embrace death through suicide and this can be seen as a failure of a universal American man and his spirit of salesmanship as a consequence of failure of modern materialistic values. Willy Loman’s debt and his death are symbolic of the consequences of American Society and were ought to face so due to extreme materialism. But Willy Loman visions life through a different window. For him, his high self estimation is the final predicament and this inhibition of greatness actually killed the soul of the American nation as well and the audiences hear Willy Loman saying, “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away- a man is not a piece of fruit.” (Miller, “The Portable Arthur Miller”, Pg – 75). The realization of the shattering dream is also found from the mouth of the protagonist himself when he voices the hollow aspect of the dream that entire America envisions, “Work a lifetime to pay off a house - You finally own it and there’s nobody to live in it.” The true spirit of the play, “The Death of a Salesman” is captivated within the following lines that has come out of the protagonist in the play, Willy Loman, who stands as an iconic figure for every American who unknowingly gets reduced to a commodity in the chase and race for a pursuit of it, “And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ‘Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?” (Miller, “Death of a Salesman”, Pg - XXXI). At the same time, it is also pertinent that all the emotions of mankind have not been dehumanised throughout the play. Linda Loman plays the role of a pacifier or a moderator between the high aspirations, consumerism and humane values of mankind. She remains silent throughout the play but her silent dedication towards her husband, Willy transcends all the languages and expressions. She is even found fighting with her sons for letting their father alone in the restaurant. Unaware of the infidelity of her husband, she is only concerned with his company and love. No material pursuit is seen touching her at all and at the death of her husband, she muses her true feelings for him which stand as the symbol that amid the extreme race for material pursuit, hope for values are still alive and that evolves through Linda and her elegy on the death of her beloved husband, “I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.” (Miller, “Death of a Salesman”, Pg - 44). These lines echoed by Linda at the death of the salesman bear the spirit of every American personified through Willy Loman and actually unveil the dark, naked and shattered aspect of American Dream hidden behind the colourful mask of comfort and extreme consumerism. Conclusion The play “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller truly captivates the essence of American Dream envisioned by a generation and a realization that culminates into the hollow aspect of the concept closely perceived throughout the tight-lipped plot of the play. There is a true and effortless reflection of the experience which Miller as the post-war generation of America witnessed to be encapsulated within the plot of the play which evolved from his first-hand experience and show the naked and dark aspects of the American Dream. The play does not criticise the human spirit or potential but it stands as a strong antagonism for the exuberant spirit involved with the mad pursuit of material aspects and consumerism which got associated with the concept of American Dream in the later years of the post-war era. References Kamp, D. “Rethinking the American Dream”. April 20, 2011. Vanity Fail, April, 2009. Miller, A. Death of a Salesman. A&C Black, 2010. Pg – XXXI & Pg – 120. Miller, A. The Portable Arthur Miller. Viking Press, 1971. Pg – 75. Miller, A. Death of a Salesman. Pearson Education, 2007. Pg – 44. Sterling, E. J., Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Rodopi, 2008. Pg – 83. Bibliography Leavitt, J. Death of a Salesman: A Study Guide. Learning Links Inc, 1984. Roberts, J. L. Death of a Salesman: Notes. Cliffs Notes, 1964. Read More